CBN Restates to Commitment Towards Promoting Financial Inclusion

Ugo Aliogo

The Head, Financial Inclusion Secretariat at CBN, Paul Oluikpe, stated that the CBN is focused on bringing everyone in the inclusive net and ensuring that it captures data from the monetary policy and plan for the economy but added that the formal segment of the financial services sector cannot alone fill the gaps found in the inclusive net.

The Central Bank of Nigeria and the World Savings and Retail Banking Institute (WSBI) urged players in the formal financial sector to provide convenient products for the informal sector, adding that this would ensure that Nigeria attains 94 percent financial inclusion by 2024.

Oluikpe, who disclosed this yesterday in Lagos during the WSBI’s Scale2Save event which was supported the Nigerian Microfinance Platform (NMP), EFInA and Mastercard foundation in Lagos said savings in any economic configuration is basically a key driver of economic growth and is a key function of the apex bank’s economic equation for national productivity.

Citing a 2019 report, Oluikpe explained that the challenges of bringing women on-board in the formal financial sector include lack of trust, education and income to interact with formal financial services.

“We must also know that formal financial services players are really not having the products that will be able to reach these guys (low income) at the very grassroot because the products are not convenient for these people and so there is need for fundamental change to bring them on board,” He said.

Oluikpe further noted that the current slow pace of growth of the economy is down to the counteractions coming from the fiscal sector and added that Nigeria is not earning enough oil income to be able to sustain its fiscal buffers.

“If you are doing some stuff on the monetary side and then there are counteractions on the fiscal side, then what are we going to do? The fiscal side is much bigger than where we are playing and so there are many counteractions coming from the fiscal side. But we should continue to save regardless of how much inflation is because the mainstay of every household is disposable income.There are several products in our financial services space that are too generic. These products are not targeting any value proposition, and are not sufficiently differentiated at the customer level. While there are generic products that appeal to the larger audience, there is the need to drill down at the customer level to target different nuances that exist in the society,” He said.

On her part, the Programme Director, Scale2Save at WSBI, Weselina Angelow, called for a joint effort from stakeholders to seek ways of connecting the formal financial services and informal sector together.

According to her, “1.7 billion people globally remain excluded from formal financial services and the WSBI strives to change it. Scale2Save is WSBI’s current programme on financial inclusion- aimed at empowering low-income people is working in Ivory Coast, Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco, Uganda and Senegal. Our goal is to include 1 million low-income people especially youths, women and farmers into the formal financial system by August 2022.

“If financial providers can offer services that meet the needs of informal groups, we believe that a higher savings rate can be achieved because it takes a lot of awareness to convince people to intentionally and systematically save. At the same time, we have to stop the perception that the low-income people do not have money to save.”